When I was young my parents bought a copy of Encyclopaedia
Britannica which I used quite often, though I'm not sure it ever
justified the significant expense for all those big, beautifully bound
books. Now you can buy in on a DVD, there's much more in there and it's a
fraction of the cost. The latest version of the world's most famous
encyclopaedia packs the main Britannica library, a Students' library, a
Children's library, Book of the Year articles, Britannica
biographies, Dictionary, Atlas and more all into the price of a midrange
gift, which is pretty stunning.

The product we have to thank for the existence
of an affordable Britannica is
Microsoft's Encarta, which really transformed the encyclopaedia
market, providing an affordable product that had the depth of a 20 volume
reference, and the powerful search facilities of a CD (now DVD). To begin
with Britannica priced itself out of the market, but now it is very
affordable, still carries a certain cachet, and beats Encarta hands
down on the number of articles. The user interface still isn't as sexy as
Encarta, which has always been leading edge, but Britannica is
easy to use and has a sensible screen layout. There's also plenty of
multimedia for the low concentration generation (and to be fair, it does
help explain quite a lot of topics, plus brings greater to richness to, for
instance, articles on music).

The new features and updated articles in the
2010 edition don't honestly warrant replacing the 2009 version, but if you
don't already have a copy of Britannica, it's even better value now. The
main addition is the 'Britannica Biographies' section (replacing 'World
Leaders'), which includes over 600 biographies of key figures, both heroes
and villains. As always, there are always a percentage of articles that have
been updated, an essential part of keeping the encyclopaedia timely in a
fast-changing world. There's also one of my favourite features of the old
paper version, Book of the Year articles - around 11,200 in all.

Of course, some would argue that there's really no point
in getting Britannica when you can use Wikipedia for free on the internet.
This is a difficult one. If you argue on number of articles, there's no
contest. Britannica has around 120,000 if you include the
supplementary books, where Wikipedia has over 2 million. What's more,
on many subjects Wikipedia has much more detail. However, the
problem with Wikipedia is that, because of its unique structure,
there aren't consistent editorial checks that content is correct. The
important word here is consistency. When the respected science journal
Nature compared a number of science articles in Britannica and
Wikipedia, there were a similar number of mistakes in Wikipedia
and in the
formally edited product - and almost all the Wikipedia articles had a lot more
detail. However, some topics like science do get more editorial care on
Wikipedia than the average article, which could be written by anyone and
may never be checked. I would say that Britannica makes a better starting
point, and is safer for younger and inexperienced researchers, but you should also check the same
article in Wikipedia for depth if it's the kind of subject it covers
well. At the price Britannica now sells at, it's well worth getting anyway.

Overall, then, a powerful and effective
information resource, particularly good with for younger users with its wide
range of extra features for children and teenagers.

Note review is of UK edition: US version
may have different features.

Gift category - midrange

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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